Question

Okay, if this question is a repost, sorry because it's not showing up after the first try for some reason lol.

Kay, I finished the problem I that asked for some help on before. Pasted here:
http://dpaste.com/1386914/

It works fine, but if anyone has any comments or suggestions, especially on how to simplify things, please do post!

Answer 1

And by the way, the problem itself was:
Write a program that computes and prints the 1000th prime number.

Answer 2

You can test less numbers. First, if you test %2==0 and get true, it is not prime. Well, other than 2 itself. Then you can test only odd numbers. This will make it run faster for larger values. Also, you only need to test from x to (n+1)/2. Anthing past that would have been divided by a number before it!

Answer 3

Okay, I'm trying to apply this stuff into my code. Thanks for your help so far. Can't believe I forgot about the odds only when I was tinkering with it for a long time lol Gotta go pretty much right now but planning to post my edited code when I have time.

Answer 4

Another thing you can do is not save all the primes you don't need... only need the last one, so the rest can be tossed.

Answer 5

usually a function takes an argument and returns something. the code that calls the function then uses the thing that is returned. your implementation relies on a side affect - isprime is modifies primes directly and does not return anything. while this works it doesn't seem kosher. because it doesn't return a value and relies on a side affect, you have this funny looking statement at line 16 - when i or someone else reads it we wouldn't know what it is doing. isprime tests a number for primeness - perhaps it should just return True or False - then you can write a conditional statement like
```
if isprime(n):
# do something - maybe append it to primes
```
that is much cleaner ands anyone reading will know what it does

Answer 6

```
>>> def is_black(color):
if color == 'black':
return True
return False

>>> color = 'red'
>>>
>>> if is_black(color):
print 'yes!!'
else:
print 'no way!'


no way!
>>>
```

Answer 7

.bwCA- thanks so much! wish i could give two medals :P i knew the content of actual functions still needed work but i also felt like something was seriously lacking in how i was going about the whole thing and i couldn't put it into words. that's why i commented everything, because though it does what it's supposed to, it's just not easy to read or figure out my logic, i guess. i think i'm going to start over again and try to be simpler.

Answer 8

giving your functions descriptive names can go a long way to making your code readable.